cubinator

These are some of the places we will go first if we ever achieve interstellar travel. Mad props to the Kepler team, they must be very proud.

I see. I was thinking of a ring that went at GEO, which would be much bigger. The atmosphere would cause problems for your ring as it is spun up, but otherwise it seems physically possible, given current materials and unlimited budget.

You can if it's at GEO altitude. Anyways, you were suggesting more of a regular ring station, like in 2001? That would definitely be feasible with big rockets like BFR.

Are we talking a Von Braun-style ring, or a planet-circling ring? Because I think the latter would be easier to build with a space elevator anyway.

What if you put an electric current through the cable? Also:

Nice! Do you get to be in the room when the images come in, @IonStorm?

Yeah I'll just stick a glass out the window during EDL and see if I get enough to take a sip. In all seriousness, weather balloons would probably not get nearly high enough on Mars to be useful. Probably the best way to do atmospheric science would be with sounding rockets.

If the VAB at Kennedy Space Center has a PA system, you could play the default KSP music through it.

Only you believe that.

So the altimeter was malfunctioning and it was too cloudy to launch anyways, so that didn't happen today. We have a backup launch date set, and it should be fixed by then.

When the hatch opens up, I'd probably say "Wow" followed by things like "Look how red the sky is!" and "It looks just like Earth!" Other phrases that will come out of my mouth within five minutes of surface activity: "There's Phobos!" "It's very comfortable to walk here. But slower than I'd like to go." "You kind of bounce around" "We're on Mars!" "The Sun is a little bit smaller, you can kind of see it" "I knew I wouldn't need my sunglasses!" Plus a bunch of sentences describing the consistency of the ground, the way the regolith kicks up when I walk on it, how awesome it is that I'm on another planet, what parts of the hills and other places around we should go, and after we've had our fun the conversation would move into more technical detail on the status of the spaceship as we inspect it. All throughout my excitement would sound clearly through my mic.

You'd have been able to hear it halfway round the globe except the atmosphere probably wasn't as thick as Earth's even then...

Both handwritings are clearly engineers, but the "R"s seem consistently different between Elon's whiteboard and Bored Elon's graph paper. It's hard to say. But then again, it would cause problems if what he says is NOT true, and he is claiming to be some other actual person behind Bored Elon Musk. So I think what he says is probably true from that standpoint. Which means Elon has been making the memes all along. It's treason then.

Do the handwritings match? Anyone ever seen Elon draw technical stuff on a whiteboard?

"Those damn Earthling satellites NEVER use their %#&%)% blinkers!"

Also would have to be a big landslide and a big deposit to produce such a large cloud. Although, I guess there is a cloud that big on Mars regardless of how it got there, so that's exciting.

ESA seems to think it's due to airflow around the volcano peak, but should we rule out a large deposit of subsurface water that got exposed and is boiling/sublimating?

Do what you've got to do. May the Force be with you. I'm sure we'll still be around if you ever decide you're ready to come back.

I love watching blurry pixelated dots turn into new, wonderful worlds.

A couple hundred m/s is the number I seem to recall.

I think not. Maybe the deorbit burn, but they're just too powerful for precise maneuvering.

When you think limestone is way too existential for a bathroom stall wall. Seriously, I didn't go in there to think about the waves crashing on a shore that would be absent of humans for three hundred million years. I went in there to relieve myself. It caught me off guard.

Just the day prior, I came down with a complex migraine, which is something I get occasionally because my brain is overclocked or something. When that happens, I have trouble communicating, words get swapped between my head and my mouth or turned into unintelligible chatter. I get trouble reading and writing, then it really kicks in and I get numb on parts of one side, and blind spots in my eye. It's the worst because my brain is who I am, and having to sit there feeling braindead for hours sucks. If I start to feel one (which is difficult, it's a subtle feeling deep in my mind) I just drink a liter of water right away and it seems to help it go away. Anyway, it sucks and I hope it never happens while I'm in space.

I'd better get to work on that space rocket...

This morning I turned off my alarm from the device itself and my phone but it hadn't stopped playing. I then discovered I had forgotten to wake up first.